Not only Great Aids to Navigation
 

Oil Platforms a great to use as navigation refferences, But the are
reefs that support many species of fish, Great place to tie up, and
also handy if you fall overboard.

Woman Overboard Survives 13 Hours in Sea

A woman has survived in the sea for 13 hours after falling overboard
from a shrimping boat in the Gulf of Mexico.


Cold, frightened and desperate, Melinda Lopez refused to give up as
she swam and floated until she reached the safety of an oil platform.

“I just had to stay strong. I didn’t want to go like
that,” the 32-year-old Lopez said. “I didn’t want to
be eaten by fishes. I was really scared.”

Lopez’s ordeal began 70 miles off Galveston in the Gulf of
Mexico, where Lopez was climbing around the 76-foot shrimper Ike and
Zack. She slipped and fell in the water without a life jacket.

Neither the boat’s three-man crew nor those of other boats that
floated past heard her cries.

“The water was rough,” she said. “The waves were
coming over my head.”

Lopez said she swam all night, following a distant sound and finally
reaching a foghorn on the offshore rig about daybreak on Wednesday.
There, she found a mouldy loaf of bread, other food and water –
and some black and white paint.

She painted an SOS on the platform, made a balloon out of a black
trash bag and spray painted it with another plea for help. She was
also able to trigger an alarm system on the platform, which activated
sirens and lights.

Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Adam Wine said a jet pilot spotted
the SOS on the oil platform.

Rescued by a helicopter crew, she was “cold, shaking, dehydrated
and in a slight state of shock, but stable” when she was
transferred to Galveston’s University of Texas Medical Branch,
Wine said.


They left out that fish bit her all night.

Joe MSV RedCloud